Coincidentally, I'm in the process of playing this game right now after two of my friends insisted that I buy it. (They're both playing it on PC and the keyboard controls are hilariously awful.) I'm enjoying DMC4 enough to be initially surprised by the 7/10 rating, but this review did an excellent job clearing that up by bringing up late-game nuisances (which I haven't gotten to yet) and comparing it to the other DMC games (which I have virtually no experience with). Needless to say, I'm not looking forward to this boss rush level you refer to.

Typically excellent effort, in any case, and you're quickly becoming one of my favorite reviewers on HG. Just out of curiosity, what is it that everyone hates about DMC2?

haha, thanks for the compliments. I'm surpised you read it the whole way through, it's a VERY targeted review and I thought a lot of it'd be lost on anyone who's not a total DMC nerd. sadly, the original draft was even longer and got into things like the lame ranking system which encouraged you smashing open chairs to get an S-rank more than you actually playing well.

as for DMC2, it's just... lame. never unplayable, but thoroughly uninspired and also incredibly shallow/easy. bbobb wrote a bash of it a while back that I remember liking, if you'd like the long version.

edit: haha, I'm sure you've guessed by now, but if you're playing on a keyboard you really shouldn't be. good luck pulling off Calibur on one. how far are you?

Cairo: no, but not many games appear to have been designed under the influence of so much LSD.

boo: jus cause there's a russian woman in a cyborg ninja costume that looks just like a cyborg ninja you fought before that was secretly a man you killed in a minefield in the middle east instead of a person whose baby was kidnapped by a mysterious shadow organizations the patriots that formed as a sort of raw consciousness in the primordial soup underneath the white house and wants a metrosexual tranny to have a swordfight with a dude with another ninja suit on top of federal hall

yeah, you can really fuck them up that way. but generally the safe strategy as Dante is to just use charged shotgun blasts on them until their shield is down, hit them with the shotgun again until they fall down, and then hit them with a distorted real impact. or just a real impact if you're a purist.

Nero's even easier, it takes two CS3s to get the shields down and then you can get them in a loop where you grab them, streak toward them, grab them again, streak toward them, and keep doing it until they're down to .001% health (you can't actually kill them until they turn red). then just shoot them.